JACK COWAN: Women athletes were cheated for too long

SAN ANGELO, Texas - I was walking through the newsroom several years ago when I heard a part-time sports clerk, a female about 20 years old, ask, "What's Title IX?"

I thought, but did not say: It's why you're sitting there, probably why you even have an interest in sports.

Last week's 40th anniversary of the landscape-changing legislation brought back that and other memories of the early days of women's widespread entry into athletics.

I am sorry to admit that, unlike with such causes as civil rights for blacks, gay rights and even the overall quest for equal rights for women, I was behind the curve when it came to supporting equality in women's sports.

A young sports writer when the law went into effect, I was more concerned with athleticism than opportunity. Covering some of that early competition, I was appalled at the pitiful caliber of play and resentful that I had to treat it seriously.

Only later did it hit me: Of course the quality of play was atrocious. Those girls not only hadn't been welcome to compete in athletics as children, most were discouraged from it. How could they be expected to be good when their first real exposure to sports came while they were in high school?

The progress has been stunning. Given the right environment, it turns out that girls don't have to throw like girls.

I've known for a long time many girls had innate athletic talent. My younger sister was fast, and I'm not certain that, had we raced when each of us was at our best, I would have won. But our high school didn't have a girls track team, so her only competition came during annual "field days," intramural competition at the elementary and junior high levels that was comparatively unsatisfying.

I think my sister won every race she ran. Why shouldn't she have had the opportunity to compete against others who never lost a race in their insulated environments?

While I have "evolved," I'm still not a full-blown women's sports fan, and in fact remain something of a sports snob. For example, while I enjoy watching women's sports at the Olympics, I can't forget that the best female track athletes in the world would have a hard time beating the best Class 2A Texas boys.

When much was made of Baylor's Brittney Griner dunking during a basketball game this year, I was unimpressed. After all, she's 6-foot-8. Of course she should be able to dunk.

On the other hand, I have to admit that even though I was a fair all-around athlete, many girls today are better than I was at the top of my game. I loved basketball, and I don't doubt that over the last quarter-century there have been players in San Angelo who could have thumped me in a game of one on one.

But even acknowledging that, I'm missing the point. It's not how accomplished most athletes become that matters, but rather what they experience.

In a column in last Sunday's Standard-Times, Associated Press writer Martha Irvine told about her trials as a Little Leaguer in the 1970s. Over time, the boys on her team came to accept her: "They had my back and I had theirs — and for the first time, I realized what it was like to be part of a team."

That — not state meets or the Olympics — is the experience the typical male athlete relished for more than half a century before the federal government dictated that girls must be given the same opportunity.

Athletes revel not just in the action on the field, but also in the camaraderie in the locker room and the bonding that results from shared sacrifices as teammates. Those things shape us as young people more than nearly any activity except family life, and for too long society effectively barred girls from those experiences.

How many girls over the past four decades have become better prepared for careers, and even for civic life, because they learned what it means to compete in sports as members of a team? And how much better is our society because of that?

Happy 40th Title IX anniversary, women athletes. You shouldn't have had to wait so long.